H is For Hawk" by Helen MacDonald *****

• Book Club Selection for November 2015
• English author
• Originally published in 2014
• Vocabulary:
• pickelhaube: Prussian spiked helmet
• louche:  dubious, shady
• accipitrine:  raptorial, related to hawks
• coracle:  a small, round, or very broad boat made of wickerwork or interwoven laths covered with a waterproof layer of animal skin, canvas, oiled cloth, or the like: used in Wales, Ireland, and parts of western England.
• brumous:  misty, foggy
• Quotes:
• p.22..."It seemed that the hawks couldn't see us at all, that they'd slipped out of our world entirely and moved into another, wilder world from which humans had been utterly erased."
• p.27..."When I was six I tried to sleep every night with my arms folded behind my back like wings."
• p.39..."The safest way to avoid trouble if one may not be going to fit is to take as great a part as possible in what is going on." ...T.H.White, about his efforts to hide his homosexuality and sadistic tendencies
• p.58..."What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later."
• p.60..."What we see in the lives of animals are lessons we've learned from the world."
• p.65..."The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent."
• p.86..."The hawk's apprehension becomes your own.  You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to 'tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'.
• p.171..."You see that life will become a thing made of holes.  Absences.  Losses.  Things were there and are no longer.  And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are."
• p.199..."he archaeology of grief is not ordered.  It is more like earth under s spade, turning up things you had forgotten.  Surprising things come to light...".
• p.275..."In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.  And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it."
• Notes:
• chalk cult
• Review:  Imagine a combination of a journal of grief, a biography and autobiography, and a journey through time.  Helen McDonald provides all of this in her memoir.  In the midst of great loss, she turns to what she knows, falconry.  She takes the reader on her journey of grief, immersion in nature, and training of her goshawk, Mabel, all in eloquent prose.  She lets go of her sense of self and regains it during this intimate time with Mabel, while getting perspective throughout by juxtaposing her experience with that of renowned author, T.H. White. Falconry ties it all together, prose brings it alive.  Absolutely lovely!